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Raptor RDF Syntax Library V2 beta 1

Today I released the first beta version of Raptor 2. This is the culmination of about 9 months work refactoring the Raptor 1 codebase. In hindsight, I should have done this years ago, but I knew it would be a lot of work, and it was.

The reasoning behind doing this is multi-fold, but basically the code had a lot of cruft and bad design choices that couldn’t be removed without breaking the APIs in lots of ways, and at some point it’s easier to just do it all at once, and that’s where we are now.

Cruft meant removing stuff deprecated for a long time but also renaming all the functions to follow the same “objects in C” style used throughout Redland’s libraries which has standard naming forms:

The major addition was a raptor_world object that is used as a single object to hold on to all shared resources and configuration. This was a design pattern I put in librdf and Rasqal but for some reason, never considered it for raptor. This turned out to be a mistake since I had to then pass around a lot of parameters and configuration to individual object instances, more than was really needed. Examples of this include the error handling which added two parameters to several constructors. The error handling, now expanded to a general log mechanism after librdf’s handles multiple structured log record types and the logging policy is once-per-world.

The addition of the world object meant that each constructor for an object in raptor now takes that object, so it can get access to the shared configuration and resources. That itself meant the change was extensive, broad in scope. The single place to manage resources means it’s easier to ensure proper cleanup and deal with library-wide issues.

One other pain point was Raptor’s simplistic (but functional!) URI class. It manipulated URIs as plain old C strings (char*). I knew from building librdf, that this could be more efficient by interning the strings so a URI for a particular string is held only once, and reference counted. I used the already built raptor AVL-Tree to implement it, and as a bonus, moved that AVL Tree to the public API, so it can be reused (Rasqal has a copy of the implementation). The resulting reference-counted URIs mean that after URI construction, comparison and copying are very cheap – and given that this is RDF, those are done a lot. The old URI code also had a swappable implementation which added a lot of complexity to the code and that has gone now, since the new implementation is more sophisticated. There is probably more work that can be done here to make this URI work better, such as caching the URI structure so that it’s quicker to generate relative URIs. Also one day I should really validate that all the URIs built are legal to the syntax.

Another long term problem was the triple itself, which I had called ‘statement’ way back when I was creating it. Unfortunately a raptor_statement had hard-coded the RDF specifics – the subject can only be URI or blank node, predicate can only be a URI etc. That meant the code was twisty. That has been replaced by an array of 3 or 4 raptor terms (URI or blank node or literal) so it can handle both triples, quads and any possible extension beyond RDF (2004), although today none of the current parsers or serializers expect non-RDF statements. That change also made a lot of the internal code simpler to understand and quicker. The RDF terms were also introduced in a reference count manner, along with adding reference counting to the statements, it meant that passing triples around which used to involve a lot of copying, is now a simple integer increment of the reference. More speed!

That sorted out the fundamentals of statements, terms and URIs and changed pretty much every piece of code that touched them in all the parsers and serializers and core code.

There were a few pieces of new work added – two new serializers and
one new parser. Two of those were written by Nicholas J Humfrey
who is now a core committer.

I’d also like to call out thanks to Lauri Aalto for keeping
raptor, rasqal and librdf relatively buildable while I was
refactoring and breaking things. He wrote the code to make Rasqal
and librdf build and work with raptor V1 and V2 at the same time.

Other work included updating all the reference documentation, tutorials, examples and sundry documentation for the new APIs including admin code to automate some of the documentation so it always included accurate details about formats.

I know that Raptor 2 is not going to place Raptor 1 for applications for some time, so this is a separately installed library with a new location for the header file and a new shared library base. However, once this hits 2.0.0 it’ll be a dependency of Rasqal and librdf.

Summary of release:

Removed all deprecated functions and typedefs.

Renamed all functions to the standard raptor_class_method() form.

All constructors take a raptor_world argument.

URIs are interned and there is no longer a swappable implementation.

Statement is now an array of 3-4 RDF Terms to support triples and quads.